Session 1: Rathbones Folio Prize Writing Masterclasses
The Rathbones Folio Prize – known as the “writers’ prize” – is the only award governed by an international academy of distinguished writers. The 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize is awarded to books displaying excellence in literature, comprising three category shortlists across fiction, non-fiction and poetry. This year’s shortlisted authors represent internationally renowned talent from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. With Prize money of almost £40,000, the category winners and overall winner of the Book of the Year will be announced on Monday 27th March 2023 at the British Library.
All the shortlisted books are available at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/rathbonesfolioprize
James Naughtie, special correspondent for BBC News, is one of the country's best-known broadcasters, having presented Today on Radio 4 for 21 years. He has hosted every edition of Bookclub on that network since it began in 1998 and written and presented many documentaries on books and music on radio and television. Last year he published an account of fifty years of travels in the United States - On the Road - and later this year he will publish the third in a series of espionage novels.
Sunjeev Sahota is the author of The Year of the Runaways and has been shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and he has won the Encore Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the South Bank Sky Arts Award. He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. He lives in Sheffield. His latest book China Room is a heart-stopping story of love, family, survival and betrayal.
Damon Galgut is the author of nine novels. He won the Booker Prize 2021 for The Promise, having been shortlisted for the prize twice before (The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room). He lives and works in Cape Town.
The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white SouthAfrican family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. In this story of a family diminished, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, it is a taut novel from a masterful writer.
Claire Keegan was brought up on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into more than 20 languages. Foster was named by The Times as one of the top 50 novels to be published in the 21st Century. Keegan now holds the Briena Staunton Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Small Things Like These is an exquisite winter tale of courage and its cost, set in Catholic Ireland, this is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.
William Atkins's first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and his second, The Immeasurable World: A Desert Journey, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award and the British Library Eccles Prize. He is a guest editor of the travel-writing edition of Granta. His journalism and reviews have appeared in Guardian, the New York Times, and Harper’s. Exiles: Three Island Journeys is published by Faber in 2022. He lives in Suffolk.
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